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Kicking the tires vs. puncturing the tires; being effective vs. breaking the game
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<blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 9112858" data-attributes="member: 7026617"><p>Well, I think that's true but a bit separate from what I'm talking about. Let me expand a bit.</p><p></p><p>While I've done a number of other genres over the years (fantasy in particular, but also post-apocalypse, space oriented games, and others) a rather good part of my GMing career was running supers games.</p><p></p><p>Supers games, unless they're narrow in scope or written in a sufficiently hardcore narrative focus that the distinctions are mostly cosmetic, virtually demand about as much customization as is at all possible. They also tend to demand the ability to, in one fashion or another, provide the ability to do things that would be considered well beyond the pale of balance in almost any other genre.</p><p></p><p>And one of the things that they reveal is that as the number of possible combinations increases, the less and less possible it becomes to foresee how some of those combinations will work (and this doesn't necessarily just refer to specifically the character bits themselves, but structural elements which can work okay with most of the system but reveal their risks when applied in particular places.</p><p></p><p>And yet, you don't really want to remove all those elements, as they're not only genre-appropriate, they often aren't hazardous to the game when used with most other elements. So you either end up with (potentially a large number) of special cases (if the design has been properly playtested either up front or from being in the field enough years) or a non-trivial amounts of houseruling and/or ad hoc decisions.</p><p></p><p>This is a separate problem from math that's just bad from the get-go. Naturally, supers is probably the far end of the spectrum when it comes to this (as very few other genres will demand the same degree of customization), but that just says its a matter of degree; the more moving parts a system has in terms of how characters constructed, and the more freely those construction bits can be connected, the harder it is to upfront balance everything in practice. </p><p></p><p>Its relatively <em>easy</em> to balance a simple modern action game, because there likely are only so many significantly interactive pieces in play. You may get failure states of some attributes being too worthwhile compared to others or excessive breakpointing,, but that should be visible, and if you want to, something you can address up front (this is why you hear relatively little about people "breaking" BRP based games; since about all most of them have is attributes and skills, either they break on misdesign in magic systems, or because of the aforementioned overweighting of a couple attributes and the like). The more special talents, paranormal abilities and other devil-in-the-details there is, the less true that is.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Thomas Shey, post: 9112858, member: 7026617"] Well, I think that's true but a bit separate from what I'm talking about. Let me expand a bit. While I've done a number of other genres over the years (fantasy in particular, but also post-apocalypse, space oriented games, and others) a rather good part of my GMing career was running supers games. Supers games, unless they're narrow in scope or written in a sufficiently hardcore narrative focus that the distinctions are mostly cosmetic, virtually demand about as much customization as is at all possible. They also tend to demand the ability to, in one fashion or another, provide the ability to do things that would be considered well beyond the pale of balance in almost any other genre. And one of the things that they reveal is that as the number of possible combinations increases, the less and less possible it becomes to foresee how some of those combinations will work (and this doesn't necessarily just refer to specifically the character bits themselves, but structural elements which can work okay with most of the system but reveal their risks when applied in particular places. And yet, you don't really want to remove all those elements, as they're not only genre-appropriate, they often aren't hazardous to the game when used with most other elements. So you either end up with (potentially a large number) of special cases (if the design has been properly playtested either up front or from being in the field enough years) or a non-trivial amounts of houseruling and/or ad hoc decisions. This is a separate problem from math that's just bad from the get-go. Naturally, supers is probably the far end of the spectrum when it comes to this (as very few other genres will demand the same degree of customization), but that just says its a matter of degree; the more moving parts a system has in terms of how characters constructed, and the more freely those construction bits can be connected, the harder it is to upfront balance everything in practice. Its relatively [I]easy[/I] to balance a simple modern action game, because there likely are only so many significantly interactive pieces in play. You may get failure states of some attributes being too worthwhile compared to others or excessive breakpointing,, but that should be visible, and if you want to, something you can address up front (this is why you hear relatively little about people "breaking" BRP based games; since about all most of them have is attributes and skills, either they break on misdesign in magic systems, or because of the aforementioned overweighting of a couple attributes and the like). The more special talents, paranormal abilities and other devil-in-the-details there is, the less true that is. [/QUOTE]
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Kicking the tires vs. puncturing the tires; being effective vs. breaking the game
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